Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1491

Five Signs that Your Mentor Is Giving You Bad Advice

Not long ago, I attended the “Forever Green Leadership Gala” in Menlo Park, a fundraiser for The Girl Scouts of Northern California.  The event honored two women with impressive accomplishments: Noosheen Hashemi, who earlier in her career spent a decade at Oracle and was instrumental in its 1991 financial turnaround, and who has spent the past decade leading The HAND Foundation; and Cisco Systems‘ Chief Technology & Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior, one of the most powerful engineers in Silicon Valley, often included in lists of the most powerful women in business, and a persistent advocate for bringing more women into science and technology.  The keynote speaker  was  Sheryl Sandberg,  famous both for her role as Facebook COO and for her advice to girls and women to “Lean In.”

There was a lot of discussion of mentoring that night, and the virtues were demonstrated by the accomplishments of three impressive Girl Scouts.  We were all taken by Varsha’s story about how her mentors at Girl Scouts guided her as she implemented an astounding Gold Award project: raising the funds for a maternity ward and getting it built in a remote village in India. Maddy told us all about how adults and older girls played key roles in Space Cookies, an award-winning all-girls robotics team with over 80 members from 25 high schools. Most of all, we in the audience were moved by Larissa’s story of how her involvement in a range of Girl Scout programs helped her develop skills, confidence, and a social network that enabled her to make better choices. Larissa had  been removed  from her parents’ home – both were drug addicts — and placed in foster care.  She explained how, by interacting with adult and peer mentors in Girl Scouts, she changed her path and became a good student on track to graduate early from high school and planning to major in social work in college.  In turn, Larissa is committed to helping her brothers and sisters lead successful lives and to helping her mother – who has been clean for two years and now lives with her kids again – stay on track.  Larissa was especially proud of the role that she now serves as a mentor in Girl Scout programs to other girls who, like her, are at risk.

I was at this inspiring event (about which you can read more  here) thanks to my wife Marina Park’s work — she is CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northern California — but couldn’t help making the connection to my own. Huggy Rao and I, as research for our forthcoming book Scaling Up Excellence, have spent the past several years studying what it takes to get constructive beliefs, actions, and skills to spread. The powerful mentoring that these girls have received through Girl Scouts, and that they now provide for other girls, is a version of a process we saw in many of our success stories. If you can “connect people and cascade excellence,” better ways of operating have the best chance of taking hold.

But listening to the comments from the stage that night also made me see a new twist on the “connect and cascade” advice. This time, it was something that Sheryl Sandberg said during the panel conversation after her speech. She told us that, although mentors played a key role in her success, she learned not to believe everything they told her. It was a warning to all present that, even when someone wants to help you, they still can give you bad advice. So it is your responsibility, both for your own good and that of others, to think critically about what you’re told, and at times, choose to ignore it.  Sheryl’s own examples were that mentors had advised her not to take the job as an executive at Google and not to take the job as Facebook COO – the very roles that have made her rich and famous.

What does this have to do with scaling? There’s a lesson for those who are struggling to take something that works well in one place and replicate it elsewhere. It just might be that people who are ignoring or rejecting the beliefs and behaviors you are trying to spread are not wrong.  They may be doing what Sheryl did: considering your advice and concluding that, while it might have been good for others, it would be bad in their situation. This kind of constructive defiance might even be helpful to you, if what you’re trying to scale is actually very context-dependent, or is a bad idea you’ve got irrational faith in.  As Huggy and I like to say, to spread excellence, the first order of business is to make sure that you’ve get some actual excellence to spread!

There is another lesson, of course, for the recipient of advice — and it’s the point Sheryl Sandberg was making. Even if you have the best of mentors, that does not relieve you of the task of figuring out your own best course of action. Mentees have to play an active role in judging the advice they get.  With that in mind, and with reference to some applicable research, I’ll offer five signs that maybe you need to think harder about the advice your mentor is giving you:

1.  Are you straying from the path that your mentor has taken?  Piles of research on “social similarity” or “similarity-attraction” effects suggest that most mentors will have a positive reaction to paths you take that are reminiscent of their own and a negative reaction to paths that clash with their past choices.    So if your mentor spent a year working in, say, China as part of his or her career and you are about to turn down a similar opportunity, don’t be surprised if he or she sees it as a mistake.

2. What is in it for them? Will some of your choices benefit your mentor more than others?  The answer might be fairly obvious, but still be something that you (and your mentor, who will have imperfect self-awareness) don’t realize is subtly guiding the advice offered.  For example, if you work closely today with your mentor, and make his or her life easier and more successful, that usually helpful and objective party might have a hard time giving you the best advice about an opportunity that will put you in a different role.  I get annoyed by economists and other behavioral scientists who claim that self-interest is behind every human word and deed – yet there is no denying that it affects every one of us, and more often and more deeply than we realize.

3.  Is your appetite for risk drastically different from your mentors?  If you are more comfortable with risk than your mentor, he or she may caution you against that crazy new startup or bold new project.  I suspect that this was part of the story for Sheryl ; both Google and Facebook were high-risk adventures when she joined.   Mismatches also go the other way. As Huggy Rao observes, if your mentor is a skydiver, races motorcycles, and has a history starting risky projects or doing big risky acquisitions – but the very thought of such things keeps you up at night and makes you physically ill – then you might not want advice from that person on taking a risky job or making a risky decision.

4.  Do you know more than they do?   Just because someone is older and more experienced than you are does not mean that they know more about the particular decision you are making. The more distant they are from the work you do and the business you work in, the more wary you should be.  I suspect, for example, that Sheryl understood Facebook’s potential more than older mentors or those who weren’t so heavily steeped in the industry.

5. Do your peers — and those you lead or mentor — know more about you than your mentor does?   There is a structural problem with many mentor-mentee relationships that I have implied in past writings: A large body of research shows that, in pecking orders of any kind, the people (and in, fact, animals) who have less power attended more closely to and understand those with more power than the other way around (see here and here).  This so called “asymmetry of attention” means that you probably know a lot more about your mentor (who is likely more powerful than you) than your mentor knows about you.   Consider some implications. You may be overestimating how well your mentor knows and understands you as a result (and thus putting too much faith in his or her advice).   Such asymmetry also suggests that your peers, our better yet, the people who you lead and mentor, may give you the best advice.  Indeed, I have argued (going back for some 30 years)  that reverse mentoring is underappreciated and underused by both organizations and individuals.

Of course, I am not implying that your default posture toward a mentor’s advice should be skepticism and rejection. As those Girl Scouts’ stories demonstrated, when someone knows you and wants to see you succeed, anything they think you should know is worth listening to — and some of it may be essential to your subsequent success and happiness. But if you want to get the most out of mentoring, don’t take it as marching orders. For you and your mentor, the greatest success comes when you decide wisely for yourself.

Wage Inequality Rises in Europe as Workplaces Become Americanized

As European countries have tried to restore competitiveness, the decline of unions and the easing of worker protections such as restrictions on dismissals have helped “Americanize” workplaces there, says The New York Times. One consequence has been an increase in wage disparity. In Germany, for example, the richest 10% of people earned 26% of the nation’s income in 1991; by 2010 they took in 31%. Over the same period, the proportion of the nation’s income earned by the bottom half of the population fell from 22% to 17%.

Teslas Catch Fire Less Often than Gas-Powered Cars

Tesla has gotten significant negative press coverage because of accidents involving fires. In Washington and Tennessee, fires resulted after cars ran over debris on the road that pierced the battery compartment. These incidents have caused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open a formal investigation into the safety of the Tesla Model S electric car. (A third fire happened in Mexico after a driver drove through a wall and hit a tree.)

Tesla’s stock has already rebounded, after an initial plunge, after a German safety inquiry said it found no mechanical defects with the $70,000 cars. But consumers may be tougher to win back than investors. The images of burning Teslas will be hard to overcome in the minds of potential buyers.

Tesla needs to reframe the discussion away from the safety of Tesla alone and shift the conversation to a comparison between the safety of gasoline-powered cars and the subcategory of high-powered electric cars for which Tesla is the exemplar brand — and, in fact, the only brand.

Tesla should take a page out of political contests and draw attention to the negatives of their competitors — in this case, gasoline-powered cars. The statistics are powerful. Last year there were 172,000 gasoline-powered car fires, a little-known fact.  Given that some 240 million cars are registered, that means a fire for every 1,300 or 1,400 cars on the road.  Compare that to three fires from some 20,000 Tesla cars. The fire incidents are over four times as great in gasoline-powered cars.

The death statistics are even more compelling evidence that gasoline-powered cars are unsafe compared with Tesla cars.  Since the Model S went into production in the middle of last year, there have been over 400 deaths and 1,200 serious injuries in the United States alone due to gasoline car fires, compared to zero deaths and zero injuries due to Tesla fires anywhere in the world.

The surge in publicity over the Tesla fires could provide an opportunity for Elon Musk’s company to make the car fire safety issue more important in people’s minds and to communicate the fire risks of gasoline-powered cars. For some drivers, a more visible fire risk might create a reason for a car buyer to say no to the gasoline-powered subcategory. It could also provide the Tesla brand with an advantage over other battery-powered car brands.

In taking this opportunity, it is important to recognize that Tesla is managing a subcategory rather than a brand. True growth nearly always happens at the level of subcategory competition rather than the “my brand is better than your brand” level, because is where market structure changes occur, as I’ve discussed elsewhere in more detail.

To take the fight to the gasoline-powered subcategory, though, there are two other assets that Tesla should be sure to bring into play.  First, they should continue to deploy Elon Musk to tell their story. He is charismatic, credible, and a classic innovator.  Second, in part through social media, Tesla needs to engage its passionate fan base, which goes way beyond its 20,000 car owners.

Few brands, particularly those under attack, have such assets that they can bring to bear.

Mary Barra and the New General Motors

It is now official. Girls like cars. And car companies know how to be driven by women.

The appointment of Mary Barra as CEO-to-be of General Motors is a signal to car-lovers everywhere that the company is serious about its products and vehicle innovation. An engineer with a diemaker father who worked in a Pontiac plant, Barra is a 33-year company veteran. In her current job as executive vice president of global product development, she is responsible for the lineup of the future and the components that will make cars greener, safer, more user-friendly. The centrality of innovation to the future — electric cars, hybrids, self-driving cars, and beyond — makes her experience pivotal. This is a new GM.

Barra began her career at the old GM as a young student engineer. Around the same time, I first visited GM executive floors and factory floors throughout Michigan as a young professor and consultant. My book Men and Women of the Corporation, which looked inside an anonymous industrial corporation (not GM) had recently been published, and I was in demand to explain to executives why their corporate structures and cultures set some people on a path to success (generally men who resembled the other men in power) and systematically ignored others equally talented.

I came to know most of the significant large companies of that time. The old GM was the most macho and woman-unfriendly of them all.

This situation was untenable. American manufacturing companies were falling behind because of hidebound, privilege-laden bureaucracies that squashed new ideas, failed to listen to voices from below, behaved arrogantly toward customers, and generally stifled innovation. GM was trying to change its culture (and I credited the company for that in my book The Change Masters). But it was too insular to make much progress. GM’s way of change was to leave the mainstream establishment untouched while setting up a separate unit to try to do it all differently – NUMMI, a joint venture with Toyota in California, or the now-defunct innovative Saturn subsidiary.

Meanwhile, GM was nurturing female talent in its classrooms. Little did any of us know then, but two of the world’s most powerful future CEOs – the future heads of Fortune 20 companies — were getting their engineering training at General Motors Institute — Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, and Mary Barra.

“What’s good for General Motors is good for America” has been derided endlessly as a joke of a slogan from the military-industrial complex – but this time I sincerely mean it.

Mary Barra is good for GM first and foremost because she’s an engineer who cares about cars. She is good for GM because she reflects the new culture of teamwork and collaboration. She knows the people side as the former head of HR. She is a clearly a team player with the support of her peers, such as CFO Dan Ammann, promoted to president working with Barra. In July, Barra and Amman came together to a high-level executive program at Harvard Business School, Leading the Global Company, which I taught with several colleagues. In both of them I saw the listening-learning embrace-differences style of leaders of the future, and no traces of the arrogant know-it-all attitude from GM’s Detroit-centric days.

It’s good for America for GM to have a CEO who is a car and truck person and who also happens to be a woman. It’s good for America to inspire more students to find opportunities in vehicle engineering rather than financial engineering. It’s good for America to encourage young women to study STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), and then to seek careers in manufacturing industries that lose their men’s club taint. The nation desperately needs more STEM graduates, and the pool must be enlarged to include women.

Barra has been named CEO because she earned it, by demonstrating technical and managerial competence over 33 years. I’ll bet she doesn’t want to be a symbol, that she just wants to do her job and grow the company to which she has dedicated her life. But like it or not, as the head of one of the world’s largest auto companies, her very presence sends messages that will reverberate around the world. (For Saudi Arabia, for example, the message is that women belong in the driver’s seat.)

The idea of a woman CEO of an auto company will reverberate at home too. It means one more barrier broken, one more sign that women can be and do anything. And for all the parents who are wondering what gifts to get their daughters for the holidays, I say the more toy cars, the better. Start early, and go far. It works. Barra is one more proof that girls, too, like cars.

Use the Office Holiday Party to Advance Your Career

Will there be an open bar? Do I have to go? Can I bring my significant other?

A few of the above questions may be dancing in your head when you receive the invite to your organization’s holiday party. These are reasonable questions — but if you want to use the events this month to advance your career, your primary question should be: How can I connect with the right people, in the right way?

For most people this approach doesn’t come intuitively so I’ve teamed up with Zachary Johnson, CEO of Syndio Social and an expert in social network analysis, to come up with a guide for maximizing the results of your time investment in holiday functions. Here are our seven ways to optimize the office holiday party.

Understand that the primary goal is not to have fun: An office holiday party serves a different function than one with your family or friends. This isn’t about completely relaxing and letting loose—unless you want a starring role in the water cooler drama the next day. It’s not about sampling each appetizer. It’s not about hanging out with the same people you see at lunch everyday. It is, however, about spending time with key individuals who you can’t connect with organically because they’re in a different functional area or located at different offices. If you need to stop home to take a nap or eat something before arriving at the event so you aren’t zoning out or fixated on the buffet table, give yourself time to take care of yourself. Then, once your foot steps in the door of the party you should be fully committed to being outwardly engaged and involved until you leave.

Plan to meet key people: If you find it impossible to schedule a meeting with certain individuals because of their packed calendar but you know they’ll be at the event, reach out to them in advance. Suggest meeting up for a drink before the party or simply let them know you’ll be at the event and looking for them. This will prime them to expect your approach and encourage you to make it a priority to find them. If you want to meet new people but don’t know who to approach, pay attention to which people are the center of attention in the different groups or who are making lots of introductions. According to Johnson’s research, these people tend to be “super connectors” who can open doors for you in the future.

Avoid the usual suspects: It’s comfortable to make yourself cozy in the center of a group that already knows you, but that won’t lead to the kind of meaningful connections that can help you get more done in the coming year. After saying a quick, “Hello,” to your standard crew, look for people who you don’t know very well. According to Johnson, “The people who you only talk to a couple of times a year are more likely to bring you new opportunities that you wouldn’t hear about-such as a job posting-because they’re outside of your main circle.”

Build personal connections rather than talking only about work: The speed at which you can complete projects often depends greatly on responsiveness from another department, such as sales, accounting, or legal. Identify which individuals could make life easier for you in the coming year, and then go over and talk to them. This doesn’t mean joining the receiving line in front of the CEO, according to Johnson, “the higher in the company you go, the fewer ‘getting things done’ connections you have.” But it does mean spending some time putting faces to the names of people who can supply information or grant the approvals you need to more effectively do your work. Find out about their plans for the holidays, ask about their hobbies, and generally build rapport so when they see your e-mail request in the future, they’ll be more apt to open it.

Use the buddy system: If you need a bit of a security blanket to venture into uncharted territory, bring along a friend or significant other to help ease your entry into new circles. One strategy is to approach a group and say, “Hello, I’m [Name]. I work in [ABC] department and am looking to meet some people outside of my division.” This then naturally leads to the other members of the group stating their name and department, which opens up the conversation to you.

Don’t spend too long with one person: If the conversation goes on for a while, enjoy the mingling and then gracefully exit by saying, “It’s been great to meet you, but I’m going to refresh my drink.” Or if you would like to keep in touch, say, “Would it be OK if I contacted you to set up a 15-minute phone call to talk about XYZ?” That way, they will be more likely to accept the meeting request when you follow up. Don’t say that you’ll follow up unless you actually want to and will do so. You want to build people’s trust in your follow through. I recommend immediately making a note in your calendar to send a follow up e-mail the next business day. Relying on your memory can lead to you appearing unreliable.

But don’t bounce around too much, either: You’re not playing a game of pinball and getting points for each group you hit. If you’re really not connecting with a new set of people, it’s fine to move on after a few minutes. But for most encounters, you should be spending at least 10- to 15-minutes making a genuine connection. Look for opportunities to give to those around you. It could be as simple as offering to get them another drink, make a connection to a colleague, or follow up with a book recommendation.

Of course, if someone approaches you that you do know or if you’ve met some other groups of people and are ready for something more familiar, it’s completely fine to stop and enjoy the moment. Don’t be rude to the people who already know and like you — just be intentional in widening your circle. Yes, it is a party. But it’s also work.

When It’s Hard to Celebrate Your Colleague’s Success

How do you feel when one of your sales colleagues closes a big deal?  Or when a fellow manager is recognized for leading one of the best projects in the company? Or when a co-worker is selected for a special assignment or training program?

The politically correct answer is that we’re supposed to feel pleased.  When people that we work with are successful, it’s not only good for them but it also benefits the entire organization.  So we should celebrate, raise our glasses, and cheer for our colleagues’ success.  And most of the time, we genuinely celebrate their achievement.  But let’s admit it:  Deep down, some part of us can feel envious, resentful, or disappointed. Why did someone else get recognized and I didn’t?  What are the implications for my job?  Will I have to work harder to compete and keep up?  Did I have the same opportunity to be successful — and I missed it?

Most of us try to suppress these feelings. On a personal level, we’ve been taught that it’s impolite, or even a cardinal sin, to be envious of others.  Organizationally, we’ve been schooled in the importance of teamwork, believing that when one of us succeeds, we all win. But the reality is these “moral principles” sometimes run counter to human nature.

At heart, we’re all narcissists to some extent, descendants of the Greek mythological figure who fell in love with his own image As such, we all tend to focus on our own success first, and we worry when we’re not promoted, recognized, or rewarded to the extent that we think we deserve.  When someone else gets the gold medal, we feel a twinge of competitive envy and personal insecurity.

Most of the time there’s nothing wrong with these feelings, especially when they inspire us to work harder and improve our own performance.  But there are instances when these deep-seated emotions can consciously or unconsciously lead to dysfunctional behaviors. For example, not long ago one of the top producers at a professional services firm resigned partly because her colleagues, fearing that she was becoming “too big of a name,” stopped sending her referrals and talked negatively about her to clients.  Similarly, in a manufacturing company, a recent promotion led to morale problems within a team because many of them felt that they were more deserving of the raise.

It’s hard to root for others without also thinking of yourself. In addition, sometimes the good performers invite these reactions with their lack of humility or arrogance; or management unintentionally provokes the bad feelings by recognizing people who really don’t deserve it, or who have been given unfair advantages.  Smart managers, of course, try to avoid these dynamics by spreading around the opportunities, giving people a range of assignments, and basing recognition on measurable accomplishments.  But even the best of managers are human, and can across as favoring one person over another.

So what should you do when you hear that a colleague has done something exceptional and you’re not jumping up and down with joy?  Here are three simple guidelines:

 Accept the fact that we all have mixed feelings about other people’s success.  Just because you experience a bit of disappointment or envy doesn’t make you a bad person.  It just means that you’re human.
Take a hard look at whether any of your negative feelings are justified or should be addressed.  If indeed the playing field is uneven, or some favoritism was involved, then think about whether you want to talk about it constructively with your manager, a colleague, or an HR representative.  If, however, the other person succeeded fair and square, consider how you can use the other person’s achievement as motivation for yourself.  What can I learn from what she did?  What do I need to do differently to be recognized and rewarded in the future?
Take a deep breath and say “congratulations” to your colleague.  Maybe we can’t all be winners all the time, but we can all be gracious and learn how to celebrate success together.  Eventually, it might even be fun — and lead to a stronger team.

Learn How to Spot Portable Talent

My wife, children and I have a farm in beautiful and peaceful Patagonia, where we fatten cattle.  Each fall we buy a few hundred calves, recently separated from their mothers, and then keep them for 11 months, letting them feed on our natural grass.  Once they’ve gained enough weight, we sell them and restart the cycle.  The first year we did this, results were spectacular:  The animals doubled their weight and prices were sky-high.  In the years that followed, we started buying calves from better farms but, for some reason, our average annual weight gain kept dropping, along with our revenues. And last year’s selling season was our worst ever.

Puzzled, I asked a good friend, whose family has a three-generation history of breeding and fattening cattle in Patagonia, for advice.  “Claudio, that first year when your animals gained so much weight, where did you buy them?” he asked me.  I told him they came from a dry-land farm with very poor soil and low quality grass.  “See,” he said.  “That’s what you want.  If you find calves that can survive in a poor and hostile environment, the minute they get to your farm they will blossom.”

Last month I bought half of my cattle from a seller with low quality grass, and a year from now I’ll be able to tell you whether my friend’s theory is right or not.  But his insight makes a lot of sense — and it applies to human talent as well.

The best employees and executives are what talent management experts call “portable”. They are able to effectively transition from one role, company, industry or country to the next, not only bringing their unique strengths to each but also growing stronger in the process.   My great colleague and hero, Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg, is the father of this field of research (indeed, his wife Lilyia tells me that their youngest daughter’s first word was “portability”). He wrote an excellent book on the topic, and each year, when I visit HBS as a guest lecturer, I never miss a chance to watch him teach the subject to his students.

Most people assume that the best hiring strategy is to find the best performers in a given field and get them on your team.  But Boris has found that most people aren’t so portable:  some who are shining stars in one context can fall out of the sky in another.  One of the best ways in which he demonstrates this is with a study on equity research analysts moving between Wall Street investment banks. You would expect high portability in these situations. As Boris puts it, when a star analyst at investment bank A accepts an offer to join investment bank B, he gets a box, puts his laptop and a few other things in it, goes down the elevator, looks left and right before crossing Wall Street, goes up the elevator, and exactly 56 seconds later he is working at his new job.  He operates in a similar environment, analyzes the same companies in the same sector, and has the same clients.  He doesn’t have to sell his house, move to another state, buy a new house, look for new schools for the children, or help his spouse cope and adjust to a move.  What could be easier?  Yet, Boris has found that, while star equity research analysts that stay at one firm continue to shine, the performance of those who move declines quite dramatically in the following year and remains below previous heights even after five years.

Talent is much less portable than what we think because performance isn’t just one P; it stems from five — processes, platforms, products, people, and politics – and most of those you can’t take with you.

Am I, a 28-year veteran search consultant, confessing my sins and telling you that executives can’t successfully move from one organization to another and so you shouldn’t ever hire from the outside?  Of course not.  Sometimes it’s the only alternative, or the best one.  But you should  help yourself make better decisions on outside hires, as well as internal moves, by learning the key lessons on talent portability.  While falling stars are the average outcome, there are several caveats.

First, origin and destination matter.  While cattle from fertile farms didn’t gain as much weight at ours, the survivors of poor environments flourished.  Likewise, when an executive moves to a weaker firm, performance is likely to decrease; if the person moves to a stronger firm, he or she will keep shining.  Think about it in more practical terms:  Should you only embrace candidates from outstanding firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, as many companies do? Or would you be better off following a more counterintuitive strategy and finding the true stars who have managed to thrive at weaker firms?

Team-specific human capital is important too: when people move together, they tend to do better than when they do it alone.  Boris has also found that starting something new in a new company (what he calls “exploration”) is much harder than taking over an existing project, team or unit (“exploitation”).  In addition, some types of roles are more portable than others: COOs are much less so because their job requires lots of internal knowledge and many relationships; CFOs and other functional experts are usually better positioned to move.

Finally, you must check for how well an incoming star will fit into your industry given its dynamics; your organization given its culture and strategy; and your team given the personalities on it.  Consider the performance of GE executives hired to lead other companies.  We all know that the company has long been a factory for talent, so much so that its alumni account for the second largest group of CEOs within the Fortune 500, after Harvard MBAs.  Whenever an executive leaves GE to become the CEO of another firm, the market value of the latter typically spikes — by at least a billion dollars for large entities, and in some cases by up to $10 billion.  Yet when Boris, along with HBS’s Andrew N. McLean and Nitin Nohria, analyzed the performance of those stocks over the following three years, the results, presented in this article, were mixed. While many of the newly appointed CEOs created great value, others presided over huge value destruction.  What made the difference?  Fit, and especially the strategic kind:  some people are great for startups, others for turnarounds, others for managing cyclical businesses.

If you want to keep your stars bright, reject the myth of the executive who shines at all times and in all places. Instead, assess for your candidates’ portability, including a careful check for fit.

This post is adapted from my forthcoming book, It’s Not the How or the What but the Who:  Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




Why Japan’s Talent Wars Now Hinge on Women
Research: Recession Grads May Wind Up Happier in the Long Run
Ten Essential Tips for Hiring Your Next CEO
Hiring and Big Data: Those Who Could Be Left Behind

For Cross-Functional Change, a Good Disruption Helps

How do you improve the whole organization, not just parts of it? The uber challenge for process improvement in organizations has always been to successfully make improvements across functions. But have any sizable organizations assigned people to manage their major end-to-end processes — and actually been successful?

I got this question from a process leader at a UK bank. He had read my post, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?,” and contacted me because his bank has had success in managing departmental processes, but is struggling to crack the cross-functional, end-to-end management of processes. (An example of an “end-to-end process” is all the work involved from the time a customer places an order until it is delivered, including order entry, order fulfillment, and billing.)

This particular bank is currently on a major “Lean” journey (adopting Toyota’s production system methods and thinking), which was started three years ago, and they are making continuous improvement part of their standard work. He said it has gone well, but only at a functional level. Trying to get end-to-end improvements has proven to be very difficult and virtually impossible to do without a special initiative or project driving the change. They now have some significant resources and imperatives to make cross-functional process ownership happen. But with the scale and complexity of the organization, he is concerned that they may never get over the “managing by function” problem.

I checked with my friend , a consultant who has worked extensively in UK banking, and he said the main reason why there are no process owners — perhaps surprisingly given the state of the banking industry— is that there is not yet a compelling enough reason to change. His most recent client (another bank) had a similar process approach with plenty of supporting documentation and improvement work, but having achieved only the beginnings of end-to-end transformation (process managers were not yet in place). The reason, he concluded, was because “In UK banking, we may need to wait for a sufficiently disruptive event — regulation- or market-driven — that causes the established banks to radically re-think what they do.”

Nick’s assessment of the dearth of end-to-end process owners fits with dynamics I see in organizations between their “performance engines,” which operate the business day-to-day, and their management systems for innovation. Most organizations are optimized for current operational performance. The presumption is that tomorrow will look like today, so all we need to do is fine tune our successful model. We can make incremental change, often called continuous improvement, within the performance engine. More dramatic improvement (innovation, transformation) requires a motivator: a feeling that our world is being disrupted. In this increasingly common condition, the environment appears to be turbulent and unpredictable. The kinds of change required to accommodate a world of increasing disruption requires a different organization to run experiments — to try stuff and learn.  (Not fine tune, but innovate.)

The operating model for experimentation needs an organization with process owners who manage big changes across functions and departments. The challenge is, most of us have a relationship scope of about 100-200 people, so we like to work with these “tribes” of people like us. It’s more difficult with big end-to-end processes to have a tribe that has ownership of the overall goal and a process owner who is also the tribal leader.

In the absence of a significant disruptive event, or obvious proof that the world is changing, the gravitational forces in organizations pull strongly towards the performance engine: functional, hierarchical, command-and-control, rigid. And this engine gets improved and streamlined only with small, incremental changes. I have seen organizations implement complex process management structures (with process executives, process owners, process champions, and process councils) to support the implementation of a major enterprise system. However, the process ownership role then appears to become redundant and hard to justify once the system has been implemented and is delivering the intended benefits.

End-to-end process owners can indeed make a difference in effecting cross-functional change. But organizational leaders must help them fight the powerful, gravitational forces of the command-and-control performance engine that maintain the status quo. To overcome these forces, a good disruption can help. But in an environment that is increasingly unpredictable and volatile, leaders must devote more resources to sensing and responding to threats and opportunities, and then must communicate to the organization what “responding” means in terms of changing the way it does its work. Without a clear and compelling, motivating case being made by leaders, successful cross-functional changes will remain few and far between.

The Case for Slacking Off

I recently asked an executive I coached how many emails she received each day. “Five hundred,” she replied.  But I don’t read any of them. If I did, I wouldn’t really be doing my job. Given the work I do, my challenge isn’t obtaining information but figuring out how to push information away so that I don’t suffer from information overload. I need time to think.”

Helen (as I’ll call her here) did have an assistant who slugged his way through all her emails, and she spent a few hours each week discussing the more problematic ones with him. But what I liked about Helen’s comment was her realization that she needed a considerable amount of time-out to reflect, to be really creative.

As she said, “I am not paid for doing this kind of work. If I’m so busy doing what people expect me to do, there will be no time left for what I ought to do. You can’t do creative work at a cyber pace. Creative work has its traditional rhythms. To be creative, you need to possess a more serene state of mind. Over the years I have learned the hard way that technology sometimes encourages people to confuse busyness with effectiveness. I need quiet time to be able to function.”

It’s an important point. If Charlie Chaplin were to make Modern Times (his caricatured portrayal of frantic survival in the modern, industrialized world) today, you wouldn’t see mechanical wheels crushing the little tramp. Instead, it would show instead him drowning in a flood of email. The outcome would be the same, however: a nervous breakdown.

The biggest problem we have in contemporary society is not that we do too little but that we try to do too much. All the pressures in the workplace and in the social domain are about collaborating, speaking up, stepping forward, leaning in —doing practically anything to be noticed and to get ahead. When all is said and done, doing nothing does not get much press. In fact, in our cyber age doing nothing has become almost impossible with all the distractions our iPhones and iPads provide. People fill their downtime surfing electronic devices in the subway, in the line at Starbucks, and even in meetings.

More and more, the balance between activity and inactivity has become seriously out of sync. But slacking off — making a conscious effort not to be busy — may be the best thing we can do for our brain’s health. It is the incubator for future bursts of creativity.  Being able to balance activity and solitude, noise and quietness, is a great way to tap into our inner creative resources. It is invaluable in nurturing whatever creative sparks we possess.

To some extent, we do understand in theory that downtime is good.  But we also get conditioned to be busy early in life.  How many times did your parents or teachers ever suggest you do nothing? As an adult, have you ever found anybody at work telling you to do nothing — to just take your time and reflect? Frankly, people who encourage nothingness are very rare; it isn’t really acceptable in today’s society. Instead, what you’re usually told to do is to work harder, to be diligent, to be on the ball. For most of us, doing nothing is associated with being irresponsible, with being on the wrong track, or even worse, with wasting our lives. As a result silence and stillness terrify us and we protect ourselves from these terrors with noise and frantic activity.

I have learned from experience that the most effective executives realize that doing nothing is good for their mental health. They can take a step back and consciously unplug themselves from the compulsion to always keep busy, the habit of shielding themselves from certain feelings, and the tensions of trying to manipulate their experience before even fully acknowledging what that experience is. Turning down the volume on life can be extremely beneficial and brings them to regions of the mind that they are otherwise busily avoiding.

And while they’re in these regions of the mind, they’re more likely to generate novel ideas. By inducing unconscious thought through reflection they modify the very nature of their search for innovative solutions to complex issues. They understand that doing nothing is the best path to productivity.

Is There Hope for Small Firms, the Have-Nots in the World of Big Data?

Here’s a wishful vision of the future that’s even more radical than Amazon’s concept of delivery drones or Google’s robots: One day, small businesses will have access to affordable consumer data.

Don’t yawn. This is a life-and-death issue for small businesses. Anyone who has worked in or around a supplier to a big consumer company—to a supermarket chain, for example—knows the value of information on shoppers’ preferences. If a supplier can use consumer data to shape its offerings and marketing strategies, it has a significantly better chance of survival than its data-deprived competitors.

We saw the value of data firsthand in a study we did with Gillian Armstrong of the University of Ulster and Andrew Fearne of the University of Kent in the Northern Ireland region of the UK. We provided consumer data and analysis—free of charge, thanks to a government grant—to a group of food and beverage companies that had previously relied mainly on their managers’ intuition and a little guidance from supermarkets. With training and assistance, the providers were able to see how their categories were performing in supermarket aisles and what segments of consumers were buying their products.

“Data exposure focused our feel for the market,” a manager of a tea company told us. “It formed a basis for extended thinking in terms of tea product content, packaging, and design.”

But our research also pointed out that when it comes to data, there are the haves and the have-nots. The suppliers we studied were small—the largest had just 45 employees—and their modest annual turnover made data prohibitively expensive. They never could have afforded the ongoing cost of the consumer data. A single analyzed report runs €7,000, and to keep up with the big firms, they’d need more than that.

Once their eyes were opened to the power of data, the firms saw immediately how great their disadvantage had been. After our project ended, they went back, as one firm owner put it, to “Square One.”

If it’s true, as Andrew McAfee writes, that “data-dominated firms are going to take market share, customers, and profits away from those who are still relying too heavily on their human experts,” then we can expect to see a very different business landscape some years down the road. It will be a landscape with many fewer of the small, artisan businesses that have been so important to societies for millennia.

Small businesses account for a large proportion of private-sector employment; in the U.S., for example, despite a vast corporate sector, the figure is 49%. Small firms are a “fountain of job growth,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; companies with fewer than 500 employees account for about two-thirds of net jobs created in the country. They are often great places to work, too. One study shows that marketing managers in small firms report higher levels of job satisfaction, greater esprit de corps, and more organizational commitment than their counterparts in large firms.

Moreover, consumers enjoy the products of small businesses—some of the items provided by the firms we studied were popular in the big supermarkets because they were marked as “locally produced” or “premium.” An added benefit is that these products tend to be high-margin, both for the suppliers and the stores.

Which raises a question: Should big companies assist small companies by providing them with inexpensive access to data?

It’s in the chains’ interest to keep the small firms alive: We doubt that consumers or grocery chains would want the artisan bakers, chefs, and yogurt makers to disappear, bulldozed away by the power of big data.

Yet when one of us, Christina Donnelly, raised this question with a supermarket-chain executive in the U.S., his response was that he had never even thought about it. The data gap and its possible consequences hadn’t crossed his mind.

That response doesn’t say much for the likelihood that supermarkets will ever willingly provide customer data to small suppliers at reduced cost. And in any case, the flow of data is more complicated than it may seem: Food and beverage companies that purchase customer-preference data get it not from supermarkets but from analytics firms that manage the data on behalf of the supermarkets, analyze it, and package it. Analytics firms may be even less likely than supermarkets to make the data available to small firms at lower cost (and their large customers would be irate if they did).

Is government intervention the answer? That seems unlikely, given the probable backlash. A manager of a large food company told a member of our team that even the limited, experimental government funding of data and analysis for our research project was unfair.

So where does that leave small businesses? Is their situation hopeless?

Maybe not. After all, the ultimate source of data is the consumer. Shouldn’t shoppers have a say in what happens to their loyalty-card information? If they value small firms, shouldn’t they be able to ensure that these firms have access to a consistent flow of market data?

That idea may seem farfetched, but so is the concept of product delivery by drones. The difference between the two is that Amazon, with all its money and power, is well capable of taking a crazy idea and turning it into reality; like many mammoth corporations, it can afford to deploy cutting-edge technologies in the pursuit of greater growth and greater dominance. Small firms simply can’t do that—at least not on their own.

But in the ordinary consumer, small firms do have a powerful ally. If they could somehow tap into that power, the artisan firms might just be able to garner enough competitive advantage—or at least achieve enough of a competitive balance—to continue providing enriching, satisfying jobs and valuable products to millions of people the world over.

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




Big Data’s Biggest Challenge? Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment
Small Businesses Need Big Data, Too
How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts
Big Data Demands Big Context